The following table summarizes the main phases of primary language acquisition. The ages appearing in the first column are average starting points.
| age | phase | features |
| - 3 months | prenatal | child gets accustomed to his mother's prosody and paralinguistic intonation |
| 7 months | prelinguistic, babbling | screams to express disagreement |
| 9 months | uses gestures | |
| 12 months | executes basic (non-linguistic) communicative acts | |
| holophrastic | produces one-word utterances | |
| 18 months | two-word phase | produces pre-grammatical two-word utterances |
| 2 years | understands and produces multi-word utterances based on specific items | |
| 3 years | understands and produces simple sentences based on structural rules still processed holistically; expands the lexicon | |
| 4 years | forms complex syntactic constructions by involving Broca's area | |
| 4.5 years | forms constraints against overgeneralization | |
| 6 years | primary school | learns reading and writing |
| 10 years | speaks with the articulatory precision and speed of adults |